Soon they came upon intense flames—a trash house was being devoured with the swiftness of a dragon licking tinder. The bitter smoke from the crackling dry cane leaves blew dense about them, choking at their throats and smarting their eyes blind. Suddenly, from their left and from behind, came bursts of discharging musket fire. Ping, ping. This was not forty negroes, ping, not fifty. Ping, ping, ping. This was a thousand. Maybe ten thousand!

The Trelawny Interior Militia were surrounded—caught stumbling and trapped. These white men, charged to protect property, women, children and loved ones, were men of the land—oh, how the truth of this rumbled through the guts of every man there—they were not soldiers, they were not redcoats. Hold your nerve, Captain Shearer had to order of them. Hold your nerve!

But then the light from that fire spread a golden daylight across that black night, as if the sun had just risen. And there, revealed in their pitiful hiding places, were the few old negroes who had set the fire. Those slaves were suddenly exposed, clear as players in limelight, as they crouched to aim their old cutlasses and fowling pieces.

The noise of the thousand muskets firing was the bamboo burning—the air inside the grass all around them popping with the heat. By gad, it sounded to them like gunfire. But now those revolting niggers were shown to be clutching rusting, squeaking, wood-rotten, useless weapons—last-century stuff that needed an hour to re-arm—that those sneak-thieves had hidden in their roofs or under their huts for years. Oh, what a relief. It was not these ragged rebels that were terrifying the gallant Trelawny Interior Militia—it was popping bamboo!

Bang, bang, bang—and those few old slaves fell dead upon the ground.

Bang, bang, bang, silhouetted against the light, they were as easy to shoot as pots off a fence. Some slaves ran from their hiding places to lose themselves in long grasses, but were chased and felled like squealing wild boars. Others came grovelling to kiss the feet of any militia man who would spare them. Shivering, their eyes wide with fright, stinking of shit, and protesting that they were forced at the point of a nigger’s bayonet to enjoin this fight, they were put to work dousing their fire with pails of dirt.

But then they were shot anyway, those gutless black Moses, Cupids and Ebo Jims, for who would want them back after this? When slaves turn wild, they are useless to all but worms. And there would be compensation for the owners for the loss of their property.

The bamboo still smouldered lively, but those rebel slaves upon Castle Estate were quelled. And how they strutted—those gallant white men of Trelawny Interior Militia—not soldiers, not redcoats, but, oh, a force to be feared upon this island.

It was later, as John Howarth and Tam Dewar made their way back to the barracks for regrouping, that they found themselves split from the main body of their militia, riding the town road with two other men who were gossiping this Castle Estate episode into quite a heroic tale to tell. At the bend in the road, where it narrows to barely a path, they heard a woman screaming. A white woman. Most white men upon this island believe the sound to be quite different from that of a negress; the cry is softer, higher, and has a more melodious cadence, even when pitched with the same terror. Now the holler of a negress could go unmarked, but a white woman screaming must be investigated by the militia. So they turned off the road with some haste.

Soon, there before them, in front of a small house with a neat garden, was the white woman. A red-headed woman, whom Howarth often saw about the parish—indeed, a woman who so reminded him of his late wife Agnes, that on two occasions he was forced to acknowledge her when she caught him staring upon her.

Now she was raging, hollering, and jumping. This woman at once clutched at her loose and tangled hair, then fell to her knees, banging upon the ground with her fists, before she was back upon her feet, arms outstretched with imploring. In front of her, sitting tied to a chair, motionless, limp and slumping to one side, was her husband—the Baptist missionary of this parish—Mr Bushell. Usually quite blond and pink of face, now this man’s skinny naked body was black, for he was daubed with slimy tar. And the blood-dirty feathers that quivered over him, from his head to his toe, made him appear, at swift glance, like a freshly flayed negro.

The missionary’s two small sons, dressed in their stripey bed-shirts, clung together in the open doorway of their house, too astonished at the sight before them to cry. For encircling this scene upon horse-back were, it appeared, nine badly dressed, burly white women. And one of these women was attempting, with breathless panting, to lasso the seated man. The boys gasped every time the looping rope soared down to strike their father like a lash, before being pulled back for another clumsy attempt to capture him. When, at last, the rope finally caught, it tightened to topple the missionary, who thumped to the ground in a cloud of grit and dirt.

Howarth dismounted his horse. He ran to the missionary and pulled off the binding rope before he was dragged along the ground by it. ‘What’s happening here?’ Howarth yelled at the female riders.

Yet it was the bass tones of a male voice that answered him saying, ‘Leave alone, Howarth. He deserves this. All this slave trouble about us is his doing. We’re teaching him a lesson. This is our affair.’

The missionary’s wife fell to her knees in a faint. Suddenly Howarth, peering from one assailant to the other, realised that they were not women atop those horses, but white men bundled into skirts, bodices and bonnets for tricky disguise.

Now, by the entrance to Belvedere Pen, John Howarth and his companions had earlier that day passed by the putrefying bodies of sixteen dead slaves. ‘The stench was discernible from quite a distance—near the actual spot it was almost overpowering.’ One of his compatriots would later report.

These slaughtered slaves, shot by another militia for good reason, as would also be established, had been rotting in the sun for a few days. The carrion crows, in a squabbling tempest of black wings, were wrenching at sinews, pecking at crusty drying entrails, and cleaning a leg bone to bright white as John Howarth came upon the corpses. He shooed the birds. Bucked his horse into the affray until the crows soared like a thunder into the air; which just left a filthy shroud of flies and maggots feasting. But the discussion among this militia group of who should bury these dead negroes ended with John Howarth shrugging away the task as unnecessary. They rode on, leaving the crows to return, greedy, to the carnage.

Half-way between the town and Shepperton Pen, they had come upon a naked slave woman, tied to a coconut tree by her arms. As her feet could not reach the floor, she was slowly spinning in the sun’s heat. Dangling juicy as roasting meat upon a spit, crows kept pecking at her to test her as food. As she spat and kicked to shoo them, she would start to spin faster. She had been beaten before being tied up—with a stick or a short riding whip—for her skin, dusty and black, was in places torn off, creating a speckled pattern that appeared like dappled sunlight upon her. John Howarth frowned to himself, briefly, as he pondered upon the crime this negro must have committed for her to be given such a public disciplining. And then he rode on.

John Howarth did shake his head in mild reproach at the punishment of a negro boy they came across. The small boy had been running with messages to rebel slaves—a crime—there was no doubt in Howarth’s mind upon that. But the boy was then sealed into a barrel which was roughly pierced with over twenty-five long nails hammered into the shell. The boy, still trapped within that spiky cask, was then rolled down a hill. Howarth believed this reprimand to be a little . . . wanton.